Top 100 Not A Book Quotes
#1. With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.
Ray Bradbury
#2. this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.
Peter F. Drucker
#3. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#4. I said from the start I had to be trustful of the Millennium universe. It was not going to be a Stieg Larsson book, but my interpretation of his iconic characters and universe.
David Lagercrantz
#5. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
Andrea Seigel
#6. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.
David Plotz
#7. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.
Chila Woychik
#8. If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
William Hazlitt
#9. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport.
Helen DeWitt
#10. Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
#11. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#12. This is not a book about Australia. No, it's about somewhere entirely different which happens to be, here and there, a bit ... Australian. Still ... no worries, right?
Terry Pratchett
#13. Does he not feel the fire between his body and mine? Is that all me? How can it be all me? It feels like a flat sun trapped between us---pressed like a flower between the pages of a thick book, burning the paper." --Melanie
Stephenie Meyer
#14. I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic ... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
Joe Carnahan
#15. A great many years ago I purchased a fine dictionary. The first thing I did with it was to turn to the word "impossible," and neatly clip it out of the book. That would not be an unwise thing for you to do.
Napoleon Hill
#16. It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.
Pam Brown
#17. Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.
Studs Terkel
#18. For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.
Rick Riordan
#19. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#20. Truth is not a right to be claimed, but a gift for those who are able to conquer it.
Luis Marques
#21. I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)
Christopher Nolan
#22. And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.
Jack Kerouac
#23. Read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made. Face the book with a new attitude as something new.
Martin Buber
#24. I hate the vamp jobs. They think they're so suave. It's not enough for them to slaughter and eat you like a zombie would. No, they want to be all sexy, too. And trust me: vampires? Not. Sexy.
Kiersten White
#25. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#26. The Internet is disrupting every media industry ... people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
Jeff Bezos
#27. As a general rule, I abstain from reading reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer.
Abraham Lincoln
#28. The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.
James Wood
#29. He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.
This is not writ
In any book.
Wallace Stevens
#30. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
#31. Peter Rabbit's not a rabbit. Peter Rabbit is a proxy for the child who reads the book, and they imagine themselves in the rabbit's position.
Chris Van Allsburg
#32. Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#33. I read books all the time, I'm always reading. I'm not like somebody that reads really fast or a lot or anything, but I always have a book that I'm reading.
Christopher Owens
#34. I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
#35. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
#36. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris West
#37. Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?
Alan Bennett
#38. My girlfriend bought a cook book the other day called 'Cheap and easy vegetarian cooking'. Which is perfect for her, because not only is she vegetarian ...
Jimmy Carr
#39. I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
Gary Paulsen
#40. The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.
Russell Smith
#41. Everybody should write a book whether you get it published or not because the experience of sort of taking it all and throwing it down on paper is unbelievably cathartic.
Gary Dell'Abate
#42. Certain people are not going to connect with a book about the effect a dog has on a family. But every one of us has parents and has either said goodbye to those parents or knows that someday they will.
John Grogan
#43. Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
Anita Desai
#44. Everyone's clamoring for the fourth book in the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy, which makes me laugh. Just the part of 'a fourth book in trilogy' that makes me laugh, not the clamoring for the next book.
E.L. James
#45. Yes, I prosecute bastards like him, make them pay for what they did to innocent victims who can't fight for themselves. And every time I win a case, I not only win for the victim, but also for me.
Buffy Andrews
#46. One thing I often talk about in my business is that an eBook is not like a print book: it's very, very different. It's organic. It's changing.
Bob Mayer
#47. Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.
Swami Vivekananda
#48. I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.
Richard P. Denney
#49. I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think: "I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist." That's not the kind of free society I want for our children.
Bernie Sanders
#50. If he can give his readers no reason why they should read his book, except that the events happened to him, it is not a valid book.
Ayn Rand
#51. I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them
with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
Eudora Welty
#52. Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
Siri Hustvedt
#53. If you have a bright idea with such significance, don't pause but push, play and display that concept, it will be recognized or be seen somehow and it will not be forsaken.
( Taken from my forthcoming book " Ency Bearis' Ameliorated Poems" )
Ency Bearis
#54. I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.
Robert Boyle
#55. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.
Edward Ruscha
#57. Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
William Hazlitt
#58. We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
Jeanette Winterson
#59. A good book is like a seed: it produces fruit that has in it seed for more fruit. It is not a picture on the wall; it is a window that invies us to wider horizons.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#60. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark Twain
#61. Nothing makes sense, not that much of the world ever did."
Quote from the book: "UnHoly Pursuit: The Devil on My Trail.
A. White
#62. Gratitude is not just a word; it is a way a of life.
Rob Martin
#63. I suspect that I'm not alone when it comes to altering my surroundings depending on how I feel at any particular moment: diving into a specific book, immersing inside a particular movie, devouring certain foods or humming to just the right song.
Barbara Brooke
#64. You're not doing a good job of selling me this dumb fantasy. I'm not climbing into the back of your van if I have to be Robin. I'm Batman. That's how these things work.
John Kerry
#65. In this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.
Charlie Chaplin
#66. The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#67. Boys are different from girls, but boys are also different from other boys, just as girls are different from other girls. Calling a book 'for boys' or 'for girls' is well-meaning, but to me, not terribly helpful.
Marie Lu
#68. I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins
#69. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.
Tommy Lapid
#70. Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.
Flann O'Brien
#71. I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.
T.C. Boyle
#72. The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.
David Plotz
#73. My books are not generic. You know when you're reading a Joy Fielding book.
Joy Fielding
#74. Remember, if confronted by a librarian while looking for a book to check out, do not attempt to escape by climbing a tree. There are no trees in the library and the precious moments it will take you to look around and realize this will allow the librarian to strike. Don't become a statistic.
Joseph Fink
#75. It is not a very difficult task to make what is commonly called an amusing book of travels. Any one who will tell, with a reasonable degree of graphic effect, what he has seen, will not fail to carry the reader with him; for the interest we all feel in personal adventure is, of itself, success.
James Fenimore Cooper
#76. One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.
Marcus Samuelsson
#77. Ray Bradbury's definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.) - Neil
Ray Bradbury
#78. My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.
Galen Rowell
#79. Just so you know," I begin, "when they say 'Once upon a time' ... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.
Jodi Picoult
#80. Book marketing is like opening doors for your readers to find you, not a stick you hit them with.
Heather Hart
#81. Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers.
Mary Roach
#83. I hear you don't write any more," he says ...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread.
Richard Russo
#84. Most of promoting seems unnatural to me, and I wish I didn't have to do it. I'm not especially good at tooting my own horn. However, I do love to connect with readers. That's why I try to keep up with my social media even when I don't have a new book coming out.
Linda Conrad
#85. Doing everything with one arm, being well-known, and having a book and a movie, it's fairly abnormal. As far as just not having to worry about past experiences, I've healed very well.
Bethany Hamilton
#86. It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.
Ruth Ozeki
#87. Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped.
-from the Prefatory
Mark Twain
#88. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Anthony Browne
#89. I'm not a comic book guy. I've never been to Comic-Con. I don't know anything about that. It's a whole different world.
Scott Glenn
#90. Boudicca MacDaede was not the most striking of women, but she had a wryness in character and heartiness in form that recommended her to the rough demands of a farmer's daughter and a soldier's sufferance." ~ First two lines of book 1 in the Haanta Series
Michelle Franklin
#91. This book I'm reading says if you want to be as thin as a stalk of celery, then that's what you should be eating. I'm not sure I want to look like celery, but I know I don't want to look like a biscuit.
Rebecca Rasmussen
#92. I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all.
Karl Lagerfeld
#93. Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.
Robert Ballard
#94. I like things to be really, really funny, or really, really dramatic. Those books are certainly the ones that grab me. I like the exercise of reading through a paragraph, and it's just torture. I try not to have my eyes dart to the right. That's the stuff that I love.
Angie Harmon
#95. I am not, sir, a bad person, though in truth I am not lacking in reasons for being one.
[Sp., Yo, senor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarian motivos para serlo.]
Camilo Jose Cela
#96. Ask yourself, what makes my book so different? So interesting? Don't write to be a best seller. Write for and from your heart, not your wallet. Write something you want to be remembered by.
Leon Nacson
#97. I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything ...
Ann Beattie
#98. Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.
Cleveland Amory
#99. Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.
Erma Bombeck
#100. I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy
er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.
Mizuki Nomura
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